


Living in Parallel

by suzume_tori



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Reality, Amnesia, M/M, Parallel Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-28
Updated: 2009-09-28
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:52:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/676172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzume_tori/pseuds/suzume_tori
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinji wakes up in a completely normal world for no discernible reason. He has to play along and hide what he knows of the 'real' world -- until he can figure out what *is* real, and how he got to be there. When the angel he killed in the not-world shows up in his class, Shinji's efforts to integrate himself become much more difficult.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living in Parallel

**Author's Note:**

> **General** : This is another fic that I dug up, but this was from a computer that died years ago that a friend recovered directly from the hard-disk (yay!)
> 
> It is also unfinished, but had a happy ending in mind. Since I must've done this in my early teen years, I haven't even the faintest idea as to the actual direction of the PLOT, but I generally intend to make things happy, even if they don't start that way. Also, my writing was probably even worse than it is now. (Yay.)
> 
> **Warnings** : Morbid, gross dead things like, I don't know, popped-off angel heads (but in detail) -- and a general warning for homosexuality.  
> 

His hair was grey, though slick with the orange, soupy LCL, which was beginning to stiffen and harden sections into discoloured spikes. His eyes were dull, and the skin on his cheeks was waxy as I held his head in my lap.

Flecks of bone chipped off the base of his skull, and the corded-neck muscle looked ragged, having been torn as it was. Somehow, I had thought that his death would be... cleaner. I'd never thought about cleaning up after dead angels; it hadn't been my concern.

It wasn't really mine, now, either. But I didn't care. I pinched the eyelashes of his eye with one hand, pulling the eyelid shut. The head was winking at me, then - I didn't like that, either, so I closed the other.

The blood and whatever else smelled foul, but I didn't care. I just held that piece of him, there, kneeling in the shallow mixture of LCL and who knew what else, uncomfortable in the clinging material of my plugsuit as it dried and crusted where no longer immersed in the substance.

I know I was there for quite some time. I don't remember it entirely clearly; I certainly don't remember setting him down, and allowing myself to return to the suit. I don't remember emerging, half-dead, and collapsing on the docking platform. I don't remember anything. I just know that when I woke up later in a warm, clean hospital bed, it was so beautifully easy to lie to myself. So easy to know that all of it was just a dream. Just a dream.

It was even easier when Asuka arrived, yelling at me for... well, another thing that I don't remember, really. But it wasn't important; what was important was that she was alive and awake and not as comatose as I had been sure that she'd been. What was important was that when I asked her why she'd woken, she'd said because her alarum had sounded, same as any other day, and stared at me like I'd asked her to explain how to use a fork, or something equally insipid. What was most important was that when I asked about piloting, she told me I was being stupid.

She said I was never going to be able to afford to go to train at a pilot's school.

And that, I think, was what was really and truly important. Because it meant that nothing had ever happened. That nothing -

* * *

Blue roses. I hadn't known that they existed, I thought blearily, but there they were. Sixteen of them. I'd counted. There were blue roses in the world. Sixteen of them, at any rate.

"Oh! You're awake." A nurse had entered. Hopefully not just to tell me the obvious... "Your sister has been very worried about you. Poor lamb. Now open your mouth; I'm going to take your temperature, if you don't mind. While you were asleep, it was more practical to do it rectally," I decided not to think about that, "but now that you're awake, I'm sure that you'd prefer it to be done this way... So, how are you feeling?"

I didn't know how to respond to that. Feeling as compared to what? I wasn't even sure why I was in the hospital. I knew I'd been in one before, though. The person who was hurt, though, hadn't been me. It had been -

* * *

"Awake again? You gave us a right scare, you know. We thought you were going back into a coma when you passed out like that - but Asuka said you'd been awake before, so we decided to wait around and see if you'd wake up again. Your sister had to go to school, though, so she told me to tell you hello for her, and that she's sorry that she can't be here..." The nurse continued to chat amiably, adjusting tubes and wires and monitors, recording readouts carefully with a fountain pen.

"Why am I here?" I asked, at length, while she was twiddling with a cord that had gotten caught on the bedframe.

"Oh! You really don't remember, do you? Your sister DID say you were mumbling about some rather odd things... you're going to have to take a few diagnostic tests later today, if you're up for them. We aren't really sure where you are right now, and I'm sure you'll understand if we feel that it's necessary to find out how much you remember... what IS the last thing you remember?"

Blood. Orange liquid, soaking up. Wide crimson eyes. A boy who sang beautiful music...

"I remember nothing." Because I'd rather stick to that than be believed to be crazy - so I stuck to the story. I remembered nothing. I remembered how to speak. I remembered people's names. But other than that?

I was empty of every memory but the dreams of a world that had never existed.

* * *

**Part One** : _A dream is a wish your heart makes._

I'd been taken home after a few days, after they'd been reassured that I wasn't on the verge of a relapse. I'd been in an accident - a car accident, they told me. My aunt, Misato, had been hit by a drunk driver.

I remembered Misato as someone who was likely to drive drunk. I remembered being with her and experiencing a car crash, too. But it wasn't at all like they'd described, so I did my very best to not remember it at all.

After the crash, I'd been in a coma. Sleeping for months. Asuka was very much like my not-memory of her; she complained bitterly about how SHE'D had to record all of my missing assignments for when I woke up. The nurse had laughed at that - said that the girl was just not sure how to express her happiness at finding me alive and well. If Asuka was as the image in my head, it was less that, and more of the honest resentment she'd presented.

Arriving home had been... different. It wasn't the apartment that I'd been used to. It was one in Tokyo - Tokyo the original. A Tokyo that, in my world, hadn't existed anymore. I recognized the place from textbook images from the not-world, where I had been not-living. I did not, however, recognize our house.

It was on the outskirts, and the grass was much taller than it should have been. No one mowed it, I suppose. But it was green and wild and alive and wonderful and beautiful if only because it was nothing like the umpety-umpth floor in an apartment complex. It was a HOUSE. A real house - with pastel yellow trim.

A house with a family.

Family.

That took getting used to, more than anything else - more than blue roses, or fallen cities, or perfectly imperfect houses. Because a family was something I'd never really had. So it was really something to walk into the yellow-trimmed-house and be swarmed with affectionate relatives - some who lived there, and some who didn't, though I didn't sort out which was which until later. Maya was my sister. Asuka, too, though I'd worked that out a good while ago. My father was nothing of the cold, apocalyptically-inspired organization's master that I remembered. He wore khakis and loafers and a poloshirt, and was clean-shaven, though he still had the odd sunglasses. There were no white gloves or military-style uniforms.

But the most wonderful thing was my mother. She was warm and soft and spoke with a quiet voice, and was exactly as I'd remembered, from when she'd been alive. Or hadn't - but I wasn't going to touch the issue of confused reality even with a meter-stick, if I could help it. Not when I had a house and a family and Yui Ikari, a woman who wore soft cotton yukatas and walked barefoot in the grass and held me like the most precious thing in the world, as every mother should hold their youngest son....

It is quite something, to be living in hell only to discover it a nightmare, and to awaken into something much akin to heaven. No one understood my happiness - they recalled me as a stubborn child, which surely had some truth in it - and were worried, at first, when I didn't show Asuka-esque mannerisms upon arriving home. It didn't matter what they'd thought of me, or who I'd been. Because whatever I was or wasn't now, it was beautiful.

* * *

**Part Two** : _...when you're fast asleep..._

The first day of school was relatively uneventful. History was easy enough; most events were the same. The small matter of my knowledge of the world of the first and second impact was easily avoided - all I had to do was forget everything about instrumentality and its affects, and remember other bits of history. The timeline only deviated once in a while, and if I said something odd or untoward, people simply corrected me; I was not the only student who didn't know his history perfectly. Of the class, after all, I was about middling. Returning (if it could be called that - shouldn't returning entail a sense of familiarity? How could I return if I felt I'd never been?) to school was a little harrowing only in the attention that I received.

Had I been in an accident? They wanted to know. Did I have any scars? Did I remember anything? Once the majority of these questions had been answered to their satisfaction, I was able to settle into the closest sense of normality that I'd ever achieved. No typed queries - Are you really the pilot of an Eva? - because there were no. such. things.

The second day of school was equally mundane. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Several weeks later, I had gotten properly adjusted to the idea that I would wake up in a bed to my mother gently shaking me, be fed miso soup, and prodded out the door by Asuka (who was always concerned that I was going to mar her perfect record by making us late. Which, by the way, I didn't.) Maya was off studying abroad; she was expected to take an internship for the tech committee my father worked for when she returned. This did not concern me overmuch; I had never known the woman in my life-that-hadn't-been, so I did not feel the compulsion to go out of my way to contact her.

A few months into this world and I no longer thought of other things. Images of my unlife were vague and distant, as any deliberately avoided set of memories becomes. Thus, I was completely unprepared for the sudden reminder when it came.

He was a new student. Nothing nearly as unusual as a boy without a past showing up to pilot machines with inhuman assuredness - he was simply someone who had transferred to the school when his family had moved to the area. After all the other people around me from my unlife, I had grown used to associating them with my new memories and conceptions - but Kaworu was another matter.

"Hello," he greeted the class when asked to introduce himself, "I am Nagisa Kaworu. I am pleased to meet you."

I had not been paying attention, in truth; I had been recopying some notes from another class so that I might actually understand then later (the original was practically illegible)... but when I heard his voice, my head snapped up quickly enough that I suffered a moment of vertigo. When my eyes focused properly, I saw the same calm, crimson eyes and soft smile that I'd remembered. Or... imagined, or dreamed, or whatever - but the dream had not finished - it had - it - blood and red and orange and *on my HANDS* and cradling his -

* * *

"Is he all right?" My half-waking mind instinctively shied from the memories associated with the voice that spoke...

"Probably. He's been in an accident relatively recently; it might have something to do with some sort of... belated expression of trauma. In all honesty, I don't know; I was never formally trained, medically. You should probably return to class - it's important not to miss out any of your first day." The voice of what I assumed to be the school nurse replied.

"I should like to stay here for a little while longer, if that's all right." Kaworu replied softly, "I've worked as a candy-striper in an emergency clinic, and know a little about head-injuries. If you allow me to stay, I might be able to offer insight."

The nurse made a little 'hnn,' noise that adults do to make it sound like they're considering something when they really aren't - and I could hear her refusal at the tip of her tongue when a phone rang.

"You watch over him for a minute, won't you?" She asked Kaworu, abruptly switching tactics, "I've been waiting for a call from my daughter, and that might be her." Kaworu must have nodded or indicated acquiescence of some sort, because soon her footsteps were fading, off in the direction of the sound of the phone. There was the 'thud' as a door closed, and I chanced opening my eyes for the first time.

"Hello, Ikari," Kaworu murmured, voice gentle, "I've been speaking with the nurse. I'm new - if you remember me, I was the boy at the front of the class at the time of your, ah.... collapse. What do you remember last?"

My mind was working sluggishly. His presence brought neglected memories back into sharp focus, and it was more difficult than usual to discern memories of one reality from another.

"I remember seeing you," I answered honestly, for that was the only answer that held true for both realities.

"...You do? That's unusual. Usually there's a bit of a blank just before someone passes out..." Red eyes and a warm voice washed over me, and I relaxed a little bit, unable to be concerned about my possible health.

"No... I'm really sure I remember you. You're... Nagisa. Kaworu Nagisa. The fifth - " I caught myself, and saw his gaze sharpen momentarily, honing in on the odd behavior, "...uh, the fifth new student we've had this year," I finished lamely.

"Am I?" His voice had that almost absent quality to it - a deceptive tone, for I knew that he saw and heard and sensed things that others could not (or would not). "So... Ikari, tell me, please - does this happen often? Do you experience the occasional headaches or dizziness?"

I shook my head. "No... not really. Not since I got out of the hospital - I was there after a recent accident. I'm... I'm fine. Just a little... off balance, I guess. Dunno what happened. Maybe I'm coming down with something...?" I hoped that the excuse worked - the last thing I needed was a return trip to the white-walled building that I'd woken in when I'd first been born into this world.

"Perhaps," he replied, voice neutral. One slim, long-fingered white hand reached out to press itself gently against my forehead. "You do not appear to have a temperature, at least."

I shrugged, feeling an odd pang as the hand was removed. "That doesn't necessarily mean I'm not sick," I reasoned, "It simply means that I don't have a temperature."

Kaworu inclined his head, no response forthcoming to the blatantly transparent excuse. "...You dislike hospitals very much, then?"

My face flamed. When he put it that way, it seemed a child's fear - the fear of doctors or needles or something of such a nature. "...Sort of..." I admitted.

"What is it about hospitals that bothers you?" His was a gentle curiosity, probing not out of spite to find my weaknesses, but instead in genuine wonderment.

"I..." A horrible, clutching feeling tore at my heart, and I shrieked, pressing my palm against the curve of my breastbone, gasping in air. There was - there was blood on the hand, covering it, and I stared at it as it seeped into the fabric of my shirt, saturating it with the warm, sticky-red liquid. I felt the involuntary clenching of the muscles as my fingers clenched into a fist, and I had the distinct feeling of something within my hand... of something separating into two pieces, and -

* * *

Voices again.

"I've never seen anything like it - do you have any idea? - but of course you wouldn't, I just - " The nurse's voice again, fluttering with panic.

"...please calm down. If you'd consider leaving the moment for a moment, I could remove his uniform and search for any evidence of the cause..." Kaworu's voice was even and soft and authoritative, and the nurse clung to the notion that he, at least, might know what he was doing.

"...do you think you would find anything?" her voice was more subdued now, but still had the ragged edge of overwhelmed fear. "It doesn't make sense... what would you expect to find...?"

"Occasionally, diabetics pass out when their bloodsugar reaches a critical level. Many of them, instead of using the finger-prick blood monitoring device, choose to have a monitor... implanted into them, usually near their hips."

"There's nothing about diabetes on his medical record, though..." The woman's protests were uncertain, and I heard her voice fading as she shuffled guiltily towards the door, caught between the need to adhere to formal policy and the clear desire to pass the problem on to someone more capable.

"There is also nothing to suggest fainting spells." Kaworu's voice made it sound like he was smiling somewhat, though I did not open my eyes to check. "Medical records are not infallible."

The door opened and shut, and the woman was gone. Slowly, tentatively, I opened my eyes. He was no longer smiling; instead his gaze was thoughtful, focused on my chest, where I still had my hand clenched, white-knuckled against the fabric, slick with blood.

"She cannot see it, you know." He told me, expression unreadable. "Though I imagine she was bothered by the sight of you hunching and screaming as you did."

"...Can't... see it?" The stain had spread, a blooming flower growing spidery crimson vines and leaves and petals, blood soaking and spreading as though from a steadily flowing source, though I felt no pain.

"No. But I can." His gaze was intent, and he reached out to gently pry my fingers apart, and the bloodflow stopped. When he took his hand away, I was surprised to see it as clean as before - I had been quite sure that he would have at least a few small smudges of blood.

"...What's happening?" I asked, voice weak.

"Who did you kill?"

My face blanched. "What are you talking about? I'm just - just a teenager. Not some... murderer. Why would I have killed someone...?"

His face softened, gentled, and he was smiling at me, if a sad smile. "Anyone can kill, if given a reason. Contrary to popular belief, humans are not naturally inclined to peaceful methods of resolving differences. However, I admit to being curious... who was it? And... why?"

I swallowed. The blood was still on my hands, and there was the dim taste of tears at the back of my throat. "I can't have done it," I told him at length, "I didn't. I *didn't!* It's not... it's not possible." The blood began to spread again, a slow creeping, seeping sensation, and the folktale of the puppet Pinocchio came to mind - perhaps if I lied, the blood would continue to flow from its indiscernible source and over my skin and clothes.

"...Is it, truly? Have you met someone so indestructible as that?"

I couldn't help it. I started to laugh - an unpleasant, manic laugh that burned as I coughed it out of my lungs and throat and larynx. "Splash!" I told him, voice hoarse, "Splash! You died, and your head was sinking down in LCL, and I knew I was dying because to kill you I'd have to have killed myself. And then I was alive again, because you had never existed, so I couldn't have killed you - and then you DID exist, but you were alive - alive and standing in front of the classroom, introducing yourself like you'd never met any of us - not even ME, not even your own murderer....!" I felt the stickiness of tears as they dripped down my face in great, fat drops, blurring my vision and then falling, and then filling and blurring and falling again, attempting to express the unexpressable.

"...oh, Shinji..." It was the first time, in this existence, that he'd used my given name, and not my surname, and the familiarity of it just caused me to cry harder, bringing my clean hand up to wipe furiously at the tears that splashed down over the edges of my lower eyelids. "Shinji. You don't have to cry... I'm alive, it's all right. Here..." He shifted, out of the chair he'd inhabited and into the sick-bed behind me, one leg on either side of me, pulling me till my back was pressed against his chest - till I felt warm and safe as his own body heat emanated through the fabric of our shirts and I could soak it in and bask in it as a sign of life.

I managed a few more odd, hiccuping sobs before my tears relented somewhat. Slowly, I allowed myself to relax against the sturdy form behind me, noting peripherally the pleasant sensation caused by the gentle, petting motion of his hands as he stroked my arms soothingly.

"Better?" He asked, and I nodded, sniffling pathetically as I tried to shrink further back towards him, plastering myself against the heat and reality of him.  



End file.
